How To Fight Duplicate Content and Maintain SEO Supremacy
Written by: Nick LeRoy
Duplicate content is a very tricky issue in which many SEO's have to deal wtih on a daily basis. It's not as much of an issue with smaller sites, but in my experience it's the large e-commerce developed sites that cause trouble. In this article I will go over what duplicate content is and how to avoid it in the future.
What Is Duplicate Content?
The SEO term "duplicate content" is used to explain the occurrence in which the same content is appearing two, three and sometimes many more times on the internet. Typically the issue revolves around content and the same content being found on many different URL's.
Two different duplicate content issues are commonly recognized. Duplicate content within the same domain and duplicate content through multiple domains. I will give you two examples and explain the frustrations each can cause to the sites owners.
Duplicate Content Within Your Own Domain normally occurs within two scenarios.
Scenario A is that the exact content is being published on several different URL's. This scenario often occurs within e-commerce sites. Tracking ID's, navigational breadcrumbs, sorting lists, and many other e-commerce based options can be used to generate unique URL's. With all these options kept in considerations, it's easy to see how ten plus pages can be generated with the exact same content on each page.
Scenario B is when content is not unique enough on each page within your website. At times both small and large websites will generate pages where the only difference in content is the location or brand name. For example someone can have a car website in which a absic description of a car is used for each page. The only difference being that each page will have a unique header including "Ford", "Dodge", and "Chevy". Search engines are smart and can recognize these subte content changes. Adding the unique headers will not always be enough to convince the search engines that this is unique content.
Duplicate Content Existing on Multiple Domains
Good examples are factory products descriptions. Many websites sell the same products and use the exact manufacturer's descriptions from their site. If no additional content is found, this page isn't unique from the other several sites who offer this product for sale. Search engines will look for the site that has the most authority and rank it highest in the search engines. If you are not the "lucky" website to be chosen you may be placed lower in the rankings or even worse - not indexed at all!
Solving Both Duplicate Content Scenarios
If you haven't already read our article on duplicate content and URL structure, I suggest starting there and then come back and read the rest of these tips. The following tips are some techniques that DKS has had success with in the past.
To solve the e-commerce based duplicate content issues we like to implement the canonical tag. Canonical tags are great alternatives when 301 redirects are not possible. The code for the canonical tag is below:
<link rel="canoncical" href="http://www.URLOFORIGINALCONTENT.COM"/>
Place the URL of the original content within this tag and place it in the source code. When the search engines visit all the other duplicate content URL's they will see in the code that you want them to count just the URL you placed within the canonical tag. Applying this tag solves this issue of duplicate content most of the time.
Solving duplicate content across multiple domains unfortunately isn't quite as easy. To be on the safe side you will need to change the content on each page. It would be best if the content was 100% original however we realize that at times it's just not possible. We suggest adding additional content and paraphrasing the existing content. The second solutions doesn't always work, however it's better than keeping the existing duplicate content.
Following the tips above you should be able to avoid both existing and future duplicate content. The canonical tag has been a gift to web developers who don't have the ability to implement 301 redirects. Take advantage of this code snippet as Google wants your website to succeed and to be indexed in their search engine.